In a continuing effort to improve the quality of shipping fruits, I, the inventor, typically hybridize a large number of peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, and cherry seedlings each year. I also grow a lesser number of open pollinated seeds of each of these fruits. The present invention relates to a new and distinct variety of interspecific tree which has been denominated varietally as ‘Plumred XI’.
During a typical blooming season I isolate as seed parents both individual and groups of different plum trees by covering them with screen houses. A hive of bees is placed inside each such house, and bouquets to provide pollen from different plum, apricot, and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees are placed in buckets near the trees approximately every two days for the duration of the bloom. During 2000 I covered a group of six different plum trees and crossed them in this manner. To pollinate these isolated plum trees I selected bouquets from several sources of apricot and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees without keeping specific written details. Upon reaching maturity the fruit from these plum trees was harvested and the seeds were removed, cracked, stratified and germinated as a group with the label ‘H3’. They were grown as seedlings on their own root in my greenhouse and upon reaching dormancy transplanted to a cultivated area of my experimental orchard located near Le Grand, Calif. in Merced County (San Joaquin Valley). During the spring of 2006 the claimed variety was selected by me as a single plant from the group of seedlings described above. Subsequent to origination of the present variety of interspecific tree, I asexually reproduced it by budding and grafting in the experimental orchard described above, and such reproductions were true to the original tree in all respects. The reproduction of the variety included the use of ‘Nemaguard’ (unpatented) rootstock upon which the present variety was true to type.
The present variety is most similar to, ‘Plumred VI’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 21,051) interspecific tree, by being self-unfruitful, by blooming during the late season, and by producing fruit that is mostly globose in shape, clingstone in type, medium in size, good in flavor, and red in skin color, but is distinguished therefrom by producing fruit that is mostly orange instead of red in flesh color and that matures about fourteen days later.